I don't want to lose you
by ThisIsKarma
Summary: When an illness takes your life little by little you realize what is important for real. With the years, the remorse of not having told you that I love you has become my own life sentence.


Fox woke up and the first action he did was to reach the morphine. He was feeling a strange something in his head and that could only mean one thing: that if he did not injected himself the medicine right now he wouldn't be able to leave the bed, and he had things to do. Important things. A matter of live or dead. He laughed because that's what he was waiting. The tumor he had in his head would kill him at any time now, the doctors told him that. They gave him a couple of months as maximum. A very exciting final to someone that had fought hordes of enemies and had survived. Your own body killing you.

And because he knew he was about to die and he didn't cared about what they said or what happens, because his son and his grandchildren had ther own lifes in the colonies Corneria had in Venom and Krystal has been living with Panther for a long time now, he has nothing to fear and hide. He would live the time he has left without hiding not even a minute more at his seventy five years old.

Sleepy because the medicine, Fox got on his ship directing himself to Zoness with the feeling that he would find him there. After all, his father always said "trust your instincts". And Krystal told him too that those who had shared a friendship could feel each other and meet in their dreams. Both sayings were not wrong.

When he reached the planet it was night time and the bars in the slums from the north area were empty now. The route was highly known, the first party hours in the night were meant to happen in the north area and the late ones in the east. It was aproximately four in the night and it was not difficult to find the yellow lights of the cheapest, hidden and disreputable bar and with his plumage that still had that shining and neat blue colour that make him look younger than he really was.

When Fox opened the door he fixed his attention in the pheasant draining his glass of whisky. He listened a bit of the conversation as he pretended looking at the content of his wallet.

-Give me another one.

-Falco, it doesn't matter how much you drink, you can't save him.

-I don't care! Give me another one!

Fox looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He was the same stubborn man he remembers and he has recovered his street accent. He was supporting his forehead in his hand, hiding his face. Now he has gray hairs, he has lost some vision in an eye because the tumor and he was afraid he didn't wanted to see him. But he was going away and he had nothing to loose.

-Hello.

-Hello. I would like a whisky please.

He noticed that somebody was piercing him with the eye and he looked straight at him. His challenging eyes, the frown. Nothing has changed in him, or that's what he was expecting. He frowned even more when he confronted him and he raised an eyebrow, like if he were talking to himself. The owner of the bar retired himself to the kitchen.

-Fox?

-It's a relieve you remember me...

They didn't said nothing for some minutes, they just looked at each other. Falco looked upset and conscious of what it was happening despite of the alcohol.

-What are you doing here? -He asked quietly.

-I was looking for you. I wanted to see you.

He moved the content of the glass before drinking a sip from it, tasting the worst whisky he has ever tried, feeling the pure alcohol that tasted like cologne burning his throat. Falco imitated him almost drinking the entire glass in one shot.

-They say... You are dying.

-Yes. I have a tumor in my brain.

-...And there isn't nothing to do?

-No. I'm going to die.

Another long silence.

-I hope is doesn't make any effect with the morphine.

-I hope it makes effect with the cocaine.

-...

-...

-Why?

-Why what?

-You said you wouldn't return to the slum to drink and take drugs.

-I have nothing more to fight for. I want to die. Do you have children?

-Yes.

-I don't. No friends, no partner, no family. You are dying. I have nothing left to fight for.

Falco drank the rest of the glass and he took from the bar the bottle to fill it again. This time he drank it at once and he did the same with the second one.

-You weren't like this before. You escaped from the hell and you find something to fight for. Now you should do the same.

-I am tired, Fox. It's always the same. Everyone I care about suffer some kind of misfortune. I am so tired. I give up. It's the end.

Fox drank what was left and looked into the glass. Then, to his eyes, Falco looked so young to be seventy six.

He though about all the years he has lost and how beautiful would have been aging at his side and sharing his life with somebody who really worth it, that looking back it was obvious that he loved him.

-Falco, I have nothing to loose. I spend my entire life pretending, I am tired of it. I know it's too late, but... I would like to be with for the time I have left. Then my life wouldn't have been a waste.

The pheasant looked at him directly into the eyes and in them they found his only reason to fight. Fox McCloud. The only one who could see what it was worth about him.

-You wither. You go away. And the last thing you want is living this time with me? With someone that doesn't have a reason to live? You are crazy... But i'm not gonna let you leave like that. Of course I'm gonna share this with you. I love you. I always did.

Fox and Falco kissed. Long. Like in their dreams.

Falco was living in a seedy guest house surrounded by keepsakes from his team. The medals, the photographies and the uniforms were the only thing that was left from the time they were young and had all the future ahead. The rich kid and the slum-dweller. The son of the best nurse and mercenary from Corneria and the son of a drug addict and the most detestable prostitute from MacBeth. The ones that skipped the rules that say that homosexuality was sentenced to death. The ones that prefered dying and had lived that living and having been dead. The ones that faced death hundreds of times. The ones that, for weeks, had touched the sky again kissing and caressing their bodies.

The ones that, after a time, at seven o'clock in the morning, decided that it was better to die in the place they belonged : the space. Their home. Dying together with nobody that could dare to judge them, to point them, to say they were inmoral.

They couldn't be inmoral. A love which waits years, that enjoys even lying in the lap of the loved one couldn't inmoral. A love that buries itself with the loved one and stays there, unable to give it to someone else.

A love that you look all days and wakes up hugging you, saying with it's own presence the much it loves the other one.

Just loving. His best friend. His best ally. His right hand. His best man, the purest one, simple and unrepeatable. Just loving him, who was waiting all his life for a single second of his love, it couldn't be inmoral.

Like his father said, trust your instincts.

And like Peppy said, in an universe of dark wishes and constant change like Lylat the only thing that could have space might only be something special.

And that was, simply, love.

His love.


End file.
